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Understanding Purpose of Facet Fields in Typesense

TLDR John sought clarification about the use of facet fields in Typesense. Jason clarified that while previously dataset needed both facet and non-facet fields, this is now redundant.

28mo

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May 20, 2021 (28 months ago)

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John

01:11 AM

Needing Clarification about Facets: in the example https://typesense.org/docs/0.20.0/guide/building-a-search-application.html#sample-dataset I see that for each record the sample books dataset adds 2 facet fields: publication_year_facet and authors_facet, additionally to the puclication_year and authors fields. Sure, I saw that the sample schema defines these two fields as facet fields... but does that enforce these two _facet fields to be always included? What is the purpose of these _facet fields, since in the sample dataset they seem to always be a copy of the non _facet ones?

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Jason

01:16 AM

Good catch. That's actually an old dataset that we generated back when you had to define facet and non-facet fields separately and essentially duplicate the data 😨

We've since addressed this in the past year or so, so now you can just use one field and set facet: true on it

01:17

Jason

01:17 AM

Adding this to our backlog to fix the dataset

John

01:28 AM

OK, cool! Thanks mate!🙂

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